摘要：
The dynamics of complex systems is often driven by rare but important events.
Well-known examples include nucleation events during phase transition, conformational changes of bio-molecules, dislocation dynamics in crystalline solides, etc. The long time scale associated with these rare events is a consequence of the disparity between the effective thermal energy and typical energy barrier of the systems. The dynamics proceeds by long waiting periods around metastable states followed by sudden jumps from one state to another. In this talk, I will discuss the theory and numerical methods for modelling such rare events. Applications, including conformational changes of bio-molecules, switching of micro-magnetics, the wetting transition on patterned solid surfaces, etc, will also be presented.

简介：
Prof. Ren obtained his PhD from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University in 2002. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2002-2003), an instructor at Princeton University (2003-2005), and an assistant professor at Courant Institute (2005-2011) before joining the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2011. He is currently a Professor of Mathematics at NUS and a senior scientist at the Institute of High Performance Computing. His research focuses on modelling rare events, the theory and numerical methods for multi-scale problems, and multiphase fluid dynamics.